Increased scrutiny, regulations and expense surrounding the delivery of physical mails to prisoners have mandated the need to move the contents of the Prisoner Express newsletter digital. Thus, the primary goal of this project was to create a seamless app experience that emulates the feeling of physical letters or writings for incarcerated individuals. Given that almost all prisoners have a tablet of their own, this project envisions an application that can be installed onto tablets to bring a similar experience as that of a physical newsletter.

To understand the goals and requirements of the application, we first interviewed the client to understand their goals and requirements and assessed the current physical newsletter’s contents. Followed by which, we conducted a modified user interview (proxy) of a formerly incarcerated individual, to gain more understanding of what our primary users (prisoners) seek from the newsletter application. Finally, using survey data collected by Lyss, the developer of Prisoner Express’ App Design program, we gathered further insights on primary user pains. Our user research uncovered several critical insights and established a foundation of requirements for the app's development, as well as the goals of the app’s audience.

Consolidating the findings from the User Research, we created an Affinity diagram, brainstorming and identifying themes. We extracted information from both the user interview and the survey data to create an Affinity Diagram. We went about to identify, consolidate and extract relevant information, which then narrowed to themes which potentially captures the essence of incarcerated individuals’ needs and expectations.

Using our user research findings, we thoroughly understood the different users and their goals with our app - our primary audience (prisoners) and the administrative audience (Prisoner Express admins), and created suitable  Personas and Task Scenarios for future testing to understand if our app is intuitive and performs the goals of our users.

Our primary users are incarcerated individuals who have limited connections and knowledge of the world outside the confines of prison walls. As such, they desire a human connection and validation, which they get from reading other prisoners’ experiences, knowledge of the outside world, and when they get to share their feelings and experiences. However, they have limited resources to fuel this desire due to limited internet access and receiving up-to-date content.

Our administrative users are the admins of Prisoner Express who compile the content and resources to publish in the Newsletter to distribute to prisoners, that is updated quarterly. They publish work sent by prisoners and other educational program content that prisoners might be interested in, so as to give prisoners the opportunity to improve their mental well-being and learning. However, there are lots of mails that come through, and keeping track and ensuring each prisoner gets recognized is a hassle. As well, due to differing technical literacy of prisoners, they would want to provide content in an inclusive manner.

We then proceeded to research existing reading app interfaces, pasting them on an “Idea Board” and highlighting features we felt gelled and wanted our app to consider incorporating. We reviewed apps like FBReader, Kindle, AppleBooks, Barnes & Noble, and RecipeKeeper to brainstorm ideas for our Primary users. For the Administrative users, we referenced apps like Cornell’s Canvas and Quizlet app.

As a team, we sketched out different views and components that we needed. We identified the components that are reusable over different views, and views that are repeated and could be dynamically rendered. We built the prototype in Vue.js, utilizing Bootstrap and PrimeVue libraries for components. We deployed the primary user app as a Progressive Web App (PWA).

Our prototype was then extensively tested, keeping in mind the ideal “happy-path” for each task scenario.